Last week I was at the beach with the fam and got some great reading in. Funny how that wasn't happening just a couple years ago with really little kids. But at ages six, four, & two I'm able to squeeze a page in here and there in between squeezing out sun screen for my pasty-white-skinned kids.
One book I read was "What the Dog Saw" by Malcolm Gladwell. If you've never read anything by Gladwell, you should check him out. He brilliantly ties together random people and social trends and shows how seemingly un-related things are connected.
For example, in one of the essays in "What the Dog Saw" Gladwell draws a parallel between how hard it is to identify good teachers coming out of college with drafting a pro quarterback into the NFL. The wash-out rate is high in both cases, and all the education and profiling in the world can't guarantee success in either endeavor.
The trick with Gladwell is to come along and enjoy the ride. If you over-analyze or object to every little thing, you'll miss the music of it. One reviewer said, "he's like a...many-armed Hindu god of anecdotes; he plucks them from every field of human endeavor."
The New Testament book of Hebrews is one of the most mysterious and opaque books of the Bible. In my first serious reading of it just after college I about gave up on making any sense of it.
But as I began to get more familiar with the Old Testament, I began to see things a little more clearly in Hebrews.
The author of Hebrews (no one knows who it is, but it's certainly not Paul) is like Malcolm Gladwell. He plucks stories and illustrations from the history of Israel with reckless and joyful abandon. He eagerly gathers up bits and pieces from the stories that would have been familiar to his audience and shows how Jesus fulfills all of it.
And just as Gladwell doesn't bother to spell out the rules of football in his piece about quarterbacks and teachers, neither does the author of Hebrews take too much effort to try to get 21st Century Americans up to speed on all his allusions and metaphors.
Much of the New Testament has bits and pieces of this. But Hebrews takes it to another, dizzying level. And if you can buckle up and enjoy the ride (and spend a little time digging into what the heck he's talking about), it's spectacular.
Tomorrow, I'll drill down into one particular exquisite example of this that's captured my imagination recently. But in the mean time, for some very insightful thoughts on the book of Hebrews, check out my friend Steve Tamayo's blog as he's working through Hebrews.
1 comment:
It really is amazing to see all the quotations and allusions to the OT in the NT; I feel like I'm more aware of them every time I study a book. I taught a class at my church earlier this year on the book of Revelation, and as I was studying I read that there are over 500 (or some other astronomical number) allusions to the OT in Revelation, but not one of them is a direct quotation. And sure enough, the OT is referred to constantly, for those who have eyes to see it.
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